Destiny Podcast Version 0

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, 22:21 (4220 days ago) @ Miguel Chavez

I definitely appreciate that argument, but I'm saying the process of creating each of those demonstrations was also a pretty big timesink that may have been better spent actually working on real game mechanics rather than what amounted to an internal goal-setter. One could question whether the reveals created even more drive to push further and create a better final product than they would have otherwise, but who knows? It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Exactly which is why I don't understand the cautious approach. As you state, there's a tipping point between 'let's show them/us what we WANT this game to be like' and 'm-f'er we're wasting so much time on this and who knows if even half of this will be in game!' Internally, I would hope a company in the biz this long has sussed out how to dance along that line.

Maybe they have, maybe not. Maybe they decided it's too dangerous to even try, at least this early. Maybe they can't get the game to run for more than a few seconds without crashing or having horrible glitches.

You bring up another good point, that again puzzles me, kinda, in how it dictated their approach. Yes, when Halo 1/2/3 blah blah was shown, and then when those same games shipped, we could see what changed from conception to delivery. And more often than not, it was in a negative. Feature A was demo'd, but feature A was first on the chopping block.

Here's my point: HAVEN'T WE LEARNED OUR LESSON? After one or two games, isn't it NOW a mature sensible take that ANYTIME a demo is created, to not take it at as set in stone?

Sure, that's sensible and we have probably learned from those things, but there are new people getting into gaming every day, and they'll have the same kind of reactions a lot of us did when we were less mature.

I hear that. I'm sure there will be some interesting backstory to this whole piece. I'd wager that Bungie found themselves in an all too familiar situation, pressured to make a public entrance at a point where they weren't quite ready, and simply made a tough call: to repeat past mistakes by spending valuable resources on producing a dishonest bombshell demonstration, or gather genuine materials from their current build and just show the world a bit of what they're actually working on. I guess time will tell.

Yep, and my only issue is that the former is a fireworks media event (that however dishonest as you label it, is a blood-pumping extravaganza), the latter is not. And the 'Bungie' that's lodged in the back of my head would've been upfront about it.

would've been up-front about what?